With the exponential growth of the wireless services and mobile subscribers, mobile social applications and data sharing among wireless devices or user equipments (UEs) have seen enormous success and rich development. An important prerequisite of these applications is peer proximity discovery. The current applications rely on absolution location acquired through network location services, such as Global Positioning System (GPS) or cellular geolocation. For example, depending on the availability, a social application client periodically reports its physical location coordinates to a network server. The social application client, in turn, acquires information of other nearby devices by sending requests to the network servers.
Such approach is limited by the accuracy of the location information as well the availability and condition of the network services. For example, GPS data may not be available for indoor environment and the location provided by geolocation may be miles away. Further, the traditional network location services require network connections to a centralized database, normally, through Internet. Therefore, the availability of Internet connections and/or the condition of the Internet connection can also limit the availability or accuracy of the location service.
Improvements and enhancements are required to provide more efficient and reliable location services for proximity discovery.